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Open Participants, The Network

Humans at the Center of Civic Action

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A #DigCiz post by Meg Mulrooney, which is worth your time as it centers on helping people move from digital interaction into political action, led to me to a post by Lawrence Grodeska, which got me thinking about a concept that came up during Networked Narratives about Civic Imagination. Grodeska uses the term “CivicTech” and I think there is a fair amount of overlap between “Civic Imagination” (the idea of imagining a better future and then taking steps to make […]

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Open Participants, The Network

If the Web is the City, Are Apps the Gated Suburbs?

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I’ve recently read, with interest, a book by Virginia Heffernan entitled Magic and Loss: The Internet As Art, and it seems to mesh quite nicely with some of the exploration that had been done in the Networked Narratives experiment. As the title suggests, Heffernan proposes that we view the Internet itself as a huge canvas of realistic art, and then she dives into elements like design, text, images and more to explore these ideas through a networked lens. In the chapter on […]

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Open Participants, The Network

Inventing a Mirrored Self in a Mirrored World

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As Networked Narratives hits the last lap this week (it has been an interesting exploration of digital narratives, with a graduate class at Kean University and a bunch of folks, like me, out here in the open), I want to reflect on a project that took hold in the last weeks of NetNarr. https://pensatoscherzando.yolasite.com/resources/Arganee%20Transmission1.mp3 Specifically, the invention of an alternative, or mirrored, Self in the NetNarr world called Arganee. When I say “World,” I want to be clear that we […]

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Open Participants, The Network

The Dilemma of Digital Texts: Who Owns What’s on the Web?

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Close Open flickr photo by Kaarina Dillabough shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license An interesting, and quite challenging, discussion unfolded on Twitter this past weekend that centered on the concepts of crowd annotation tools and content that can found on the open web. Tools like Hypothesis (which I use pretty regularly) allow you to annotate most websites and blogs, creating a digital margin side area for discussion. The benefits seem obvious to me: crowd annotation provides a space for engaging group […]

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Open Participants, The Network

#NetNarr: Social Lifestyle or Ad-fueled Construct

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via http://van-life.net/ I don’t know what to make of the piece by Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker about #VanLife, which focuses on people who have taken to living in their vans (mostly VW vans) for all sorts of reasons — economic, lifestyle, etc. These #VanLife folks then share their travels and world via social media, often with the hashtag of #VanLife, and mostly on Instagram. That’s fine. Our world is one built on sharing and community practice (yes, there is a […]

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Open Participants, The Network

#NetNarr: Maps as Stories/Stories as Maps

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  Thanks to my friend, Daniel, for sharing this intriguing map-building/story-telling site with us on Twitter called Story Maps a few weeks ago. As we continue to dive into  Networked Narratives (NetNarr), I wonder if this kind of mapping site might be a useful resource for building maps and worlds, with stories. I like the site seems to be open-source, with plenty of links for tutorials on how to build and share story maps.  The map that Daniel shared — Bruised […]

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Open Participants, The Network

The Daily Arganee: A Slanted View

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I spent a good part of the first 100 days of the Networked Narratives adventure trying to do the Daily Arganee prompt just about every day, both in my guise as The Internet Kid and Horse with no Name, and as myself, using an app called Legend to create short bursts of creativity. I stopped at the 100th prompt but may soon jump back on board. (I hit 98 with the Kid/Horse combo but only 79 as myself, according to the Daily […]

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Open Participants, The Network

Where Social Media Tumbles into Civic Engagement

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Wired Laundrette flickr photo by mikecogh shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license I was recently re-reading an interesting article by Clive Thompson, in Wired magazine, entitled “The Social Medium is the Message,” (which has a different title online, for whatever reason) and some of what he writes about resonates with the connection between social media, storytelling and civic imagination that forms the core anchor of the Networked Narratives course. Here are some bits from Thompson’s article that stuck with […]

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Open Participants, The Network

Experiencing the Art of Sound

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It was by chance that my wife and I found ourselves inside Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the other day, and I realized with a strange sense of “of course” that one of the exhibits was something I had shared out to the Networked Narratives world a few week ago, during our work with Sound and Story. And here I was, wandering into the Art of Sound. Stewart’s museum is intriguing, as the inside “palace” inside is chock full of all […]

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Open Participants, The Network

A Collection of Comics: The (New) Adventures of the Internet Kid

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The other day, I wrote about reaching my 100(plus) comic for the Networked Narratives Daily Arganee prompt with The Internet Kid and his friend, Horse with No Name. I just uploaded all of the Kid comics that I had created for NetNarr into Flickr. If it interests you, here is the Flickr album where they now reside: There are comics in the collection that require some context, which is what the Daily Aragnee prompts are about so I am not […]

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Open Participants, The Network

Five Voices in Search of a Poem: This is the Truth

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Inspired by my friend, Sheri, and her Poem for Three Voices about a young writer that she, and I and Melvina recorded and shared last week, I wondered if I could expand that notion a bit and write a Poem for Five Voices, and get four other people from different geographic locations to use Soundtrap to record. I did, and we did, and it sounds like this: My aim in writing the poem was to offer up a critique of the […]

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Open Participants, The Network

The #NetNarr Bus Pulls Into Creative Station

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Remix Image by Mark   One component of the Networked Narratives is the concept of the “bus trip,” where Mia Zamora and Alan Levine took the show on the road. They did virtual visits with their  students, and assorted guests and open participants, to other places than Kean University campus, including Puerto Rico, Vermont and Egypt. As one of the Open Folks, who is part of NetNarr but not part of the graduate class at Kean, I pitched the idea a […]

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Open Participants, The Network

Slice of Life: 100 #NetNarr Comics (or more) over 100 Days

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(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.) I’ve been part of the Networked Narratives “course” as an open learner (there is a real course happening at Keane University, with professors Mia Zamora and Alan Levine, and open folks like me are satellites), and each day, there is a […]

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Open Participants, The Network

Hashtags as Roots of Resilience

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(Note: I wrote this piece quite some time ago, thinking it would be submitted to a new publishing site. That got stalled. This piece sort of floated in my Draft bin. Time to release it. — Kevin) A funny thing happened on my way to the Rhizome sometimes last year … the hashtag got switched. Now, normally, this would not be a big issue. But I have come to realize more and more how much I rely on the columns of […]

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Open Participants, The Network

A Strange Concoction to Consider: Fan Fiction and State Testing

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aafad 225/365 under new management … flickr photo by lamont_cranston shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license We’re into state test prep season (our ELA test is a few weeks away) and our state of Massachusetts is in the midst of some pretty significant changes to what we call MCAS. The state claims to have moved away from PARCC, but that’s not really the case with its MCAS 2.o or MCAS Next Generation. Everything MCAS is moving to computer-based testing […]

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